Taking a break from work — boy is it hard.

Every week, I drive up to London from home in North Cornwall or drive to Exeter and take the train to London, work for four days, then come home again. Then I get three days at home. Sounds a reasonable routine except that I rarely if ever take a holiday and as a result, I get more and more knackered. Well, I am taking a week off work, so from last Thursday I have officially been on holiday. And boy is it difficult.
The trouble is that none of use can simply switch off. Over these past few days, I have found that whenever I lie on my bed to read or go and sit in the garden just to enjoy listening to the birds and smelling the fresh air, within minutes, I feel I should get up and do something. But I don't have to do anything. So I calm myself down, explain to myself that I am now on holiday and that doing nothing is the whole point of it all, until barely two, three minutes later the urge returns: do something.
Most of you will be familiar with this, and most of you will know, as I do, that day by day, as we relax more, that urge to engage in activity for the sake of it, generally a symptom of how unrelaxed we are, diminishes, so that after a week we can begin to relax properly. However, by then I shall be due back at work.
Solution? I am taking another two weeks off work at the end of September. And I shall not stay at home.

What should this picture be called? Suggestions, please, on a postcard to the usual address

In another context, I mentioned to someone that I wrote this blog, and I realised I have been neglecting it, so I thought I might pay it a little more attention (blogs get lonely). The trouble is that for one reason or another, I haven't really got the times to balls on about nothing for the next 20 minutes - tasks in hand include having to have a bath in a few minutes, radio programme I want to listen to, cup of tea waiting to be made - just how busy can chap be?
So to kept you all sweet (all?) here is a piccy to be getting on with. I like it 1) because shadows are cast and 2) I always find pictures of gates and doors evocative.
Pretentious? Moi?
Here it is.

The Curse of The New

Is it my age or is it the fact that for the past 35 years I have worked in an industry in which cynicism it the norm. I don't know. I am keenly aware that as we grow older — as we all grow older — we become less and less amenable to change of any kind and rather dislike any alteration in the fabric of life which makes it less like what we have been accustomed to for the past 30/40 years.
Take TV. Like all youngsters, I watched a lot of TV. But in those days in Britain we had just two channels to choose from, BBC and ITV (of which BBC was regarded as the upmarket, responsible channel and ITV — known as 'commercial television — was regarded as downmarket and slightly irresponsible. Then, in 1964, along came BBC2 (a day late, as it happens, but that is another story). BBC2 was going to be Auntie's cultural flagship, with loads of 'serious' plays, classical music and intellectual discussion. It fulfilled this role admirably for many years and until 1982 when Channel 4 was launched we only had three channels.
The point I am making is that less TV was available but I watched far more, although I shall not make the usual mistake of claiming that every last minute broadcast was head and shoulders about what is on offer today. It wasn't. We had dross in those days, too, although I'm sure someone somewhere is fully prepared to argue that it was dross of a far higher quality than we are served up with today. Now there seem to be thousands and thousands of TV channels and I watch next to nothing. I have no interest in all the so-called 'reality' shows, or in the talent shows, and some of the programme ideas strike as downright loopy: coming up next week is a series detailing what happens when the lower deck staff start running their supermarket. Can't wait, I really can't. Or ten fat people decide to lose weight. and we are invited to join them 'on their journey' the share the success and failure, the laughter and the tears. I could sit here and try to come up with the most ridiculous idea imaginable, only to discover it was screened last Thursday on some channel or other to almost universal acclaim.
The fault, I'm sure, us most certainly mine.
Then there is the vacuous nonsense everyone keeps coming out with. Was there always such double-speak. Probably, buy I am only beginning to notice it now because I have entered the grumpy years. (And incidentally, one TV show which was a runaway success of these past few years was called 'Grumpy Old Men' and, yes, consisted of loads of elderly celebs sounding off about what ticked them off.)
One of my favourite pieces of spoken garbage, of which a lot is official, was the Labour Government's claim a few years ago that one of its targets in education was to ensure that 'every pupil, irrespective of background, is above average in its achievements'. If that doesn't immediately strike you as being complete bollocks, think about it. Hint: consider what the notion of 'average' is.
Every new venture is proudly announced as being 'innovative', 'exciting', 'groundbreaking' and 'a bold departure' which 'redefines' whatever activity it is being launched as. All I can see is that many people have been paid very good money simply to 'redefine' bollocks.
You get the drift. Yet who is at fault here? Am I being to much of a curmudgeonly stick in the mud to join in the spirit? I like to think not, but then I would, wouldn't I?
I once saw a small ball being marketed as being especially useful as a toy because it 'help to encourage and develop eye-hand co-ordination'. Well, goodness me. What vast strides forward are being made in toy technology. Oh, and toys must these days be 'educational'. That youngsters might actually simply enjoy them for themselves is irrelevant. I feel I ought to go an lie down for an hour or two.

Dreaming of losing my teeth — very unwelcome I'm a-Freud

I had an odd dream last night: all my teeth started falling out one by one. A girl at work said it was a sex dream, a dream expressing the fear that you are no longer sexually attractive. Perhaps. I must admit that I haven't consciously considered whether or not I am still sexually attractive. We're all a little vain, but I don't think about myself and my looks very often at all.
I do know that at my age jumping into bed with a woman without just a little time - a little flirting time - would be something close to a disaster. I haven't had sex in almost ten years, and although I know quite a few of the tunes, I would need a little time to tune up.
The other trouble is that, for example, the women I fancy at work are all at least 20 years younger than me, and not in a million years would they consider me as a potential sexual partner. There is one writer, a raddled old piece who most certainly looks older than she is because she looks about 90 but cannot yet be 90, who for a few days kept making cow eyes at me when she first joined, but that rapidly ended when she realised that in her I simply was not interested. I shan't give you her name, but she spent, or better, misspent a large number of years in the 70s and 80s as a showbiz correspondent out in California and looks as though she crammed about 100 years worth of partying into 20 years. She has not aged well.
Anyway, as I was saying the sweeties I am interested in (and I am sure it has never occurred to them that I might be) wouldn't look at me in a million years. Hence, I should imagine, my dream about losing my teeth.

On holidays and looking forward to time off

Holiday plans might well be taking shape, thank God, because I need a break. First off, I have sold the travel desk on a piece about going on a cruise on a freight ship. I knew they used to do them, but was surprised by how many freight lines still do them. Anyone curious should google and research.
As a rule, freight vessels which do take a passengers take about 12. Voyages tend to be long rather than short - I've even come across some 63-day long voyages. Accommodation is said to be quite good as is the food. Of course, the vessel is primarily a freight vessel so entertainment will be the books you bring with you and the conversations you might have with fellow passengers.
Rather than try to blag a freebie from individual freight lines, I have been in touch with a company in London which organises cruises, and they have already been back with several suggestions. The slight problem in my case is that I couldn't take too much time off work, so the cruise I take would have to be short. So far they are going to find out from a French company which, among other routes, sails weekly to Martinique. The voyage takes 11, so I should imagine that will be there and back. Then there is a Swedish company which does a round trip from England to Ireland to Scotland to Sweden, then back. And another company which does it's business in the Med. See what turns up.
Then there is my cousin's wedding blessing ceremony in August here in St Breward (I was a witness at his wedding in Hong Kong back in January), which will be followed by another party in his home village in Bordeaux, to which I am also invited.
Finally, in my ongoing campaign to get my younger brother to take a break, he and I are most likely to be off to Istanbul in September to stay with our sister whose husband was posted there last year.
Thinking about it all and the paid time off I can take, I suspect that however much I should like to go, I shall not be able to make the wedding knees-up in Bordeaux in August. Shame. For one things it would cost far too much to go there.
On a final note, my giving up the booze for a while to try to lose a little weight while I am still able to is coming along quite nicely, except I wouldn't mind having the occasional glass of wine. But I have told myself it won't be until the end of June, so I must stick to it.

There's one born every minute

Got home last Wednesday and took to my bed these past two days with a cold. Trouble is that what with the general panic about 'swine flu' and the vast number of cases so far around the world, a staggering 207, I believe, my wife is convinced that I have caught the virus and has more or less quarantined me. There is no persuading her that I haven't got 'swine flu' (the quote marks are intended to convey irony), but I should like to take this opportunity to point out to a gullible world that every year around the world 500,000 people die of ordinary, human flu. So let's keep things a little in perspective, shall we? Furthermore, 'pandemic' does NOT mean that it is twice as worrying or anything of that kind, merely that it is popping up everywhere, in the sense that stupidity of 'pandemic'.

Advice Part Two — is this TOO cynical, or can we find common ground?

I must tread carefully here for fear of hurting feelings (and you know who you are), but it might well be worthwhile, sooner rather than later, to clarify my initial observations on advice and, more specifically, on what advice I might offer my son (the subtext being that if I ever felt inclined to bullshit anyone, my son, or sons if I had more than one, which I don't, would be the last to suffer that fate. Put another way, I am more inclined to tell him the truth than not.
I wrote that once I had heard the advice that it is best not to spend too much on a woman until you know her a little better and feel that, perhaps, she might be the one on whom it is worthwhile lavishing your pitiful riches. Saying so aroused howls of anguish from certain quarters who felt that if a man, presumably however much of a stranger he is, did not choose to lavish on them all the riches known to man and then some, he was merely some unfortunate cheapskate on whom wasting a glance was far too handsome a thing to do.
Well, forgive me for taking the opposite point of view and for stating, I hope clearly and categorically, that the advice I quoted is not only good and true, but essential if a man of a certain kind of character is to be spared — as much as these things are possible from the admittedly very restricted perspective of ht altar — from a life of misery.
Advice: if what first arouses a woman is the size of your wallet and, in the first instance, the initial proof you can give thereof, run for the hills. And if she still shows interest, keep running until she runs out of puff and casts around for another victim.
Call me a romantic old cunt, but these things are important.
I am now, a man approaching the cynical age of 60, prepared to admit two things:
1) that 'love' is, quite possibly, not the most reliable guide to the possible longetivity of a heterosexual relationship. To illuminate that, let me quote — or possibly misquote — John Barrymore: love, he said is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.
2) when the game of love essentially boils down to preserving the financial viability of a moneyed dynasty for whom the essential task is to preserve and possibly bolster that viability when it encounters another moneyed dynasty, love must, of course, take a back seat. There can be no question. However, most of us will, for better or worse, never face such a dilemma.
So finally it comes down to the ordinary Joes such as myself meeting the ordinary Josephines and deciding whether they want to pay for sex or whether they are prepared to play a longer game.
Call me cynical or, if you are too tender for real life, don't, but that is how the cookie crumbles, whether or not you grew up in the civilised West or not.
Note to all men: If the girl of your dreams is somewhat disappointed that on the first date you are not fully prepared to flirt with Chapter 11 in order to make sure she has a reasonably good time, find another girl of your dreams. And thus spoke the Lord.

Advice — embrace or avoid?

Reaching the grand age of 25 next November (the 21st, and all birthday cards will be welcomed), I have had a number of snippets of advice passed my way over the years and have heard snippets of advice passed to others. So I felt that, given the body of advice upon which I can now call, it might be appropriate if I passed on some of it.
None will be original, and the chances are that some of what you read here will be so familiar to you that you will ask yourselves just what exactly I must be thinking in passing it on. There might, alternatively, be pearls of wisdom here you have never come across. If so, all the better. All I can do is offer what I am about to record in the best faith and trust I shan't bore you to death.
The idea for this entry came just 45 minutes ago when, as often I do, I was day-dreaming and imagining seeing my son off on his first date (and, as though you hadn't guessed, I am not 24, but a good deal older, though were you to conspire in the fantasy with me that I am far younger than I am, I would be very grateful).
In my day dream, I take my son aside and ask him whether he has enough cash for the night to treat his date, and assuming that he might not or that he might well do with a little more, I slip him another tenner. And when I do so, I repeat the advice I heard and older man give a younger man in a radio play years ago: 'Don't spend a lot of money on a woman you don't know. Only start spending more money on her when and if you know her better and feel she is worth the expense. And if she doesn't like not having money lavished on her, tough and at least that will let you have more the measure of her.'
I heard it just the once, although at an age when I had already probably made the mistake against which the advice counseled. But i do remember telling myself to remember it and pass it on to a so, if and when I had one.
Anyway, walking down the street (in Paddington, West London, if you are interested, after eating a pleasant pizza with a tomato and onion salad and putting away a half-litre carafe of wine) I decided to dredge my memory for whatever other pieces of adice I had come across over the years.
There is, of course, the obvious one — and one I disagree with profoundly: never listen to advice. That of course is nonsense, although the implications behind that particular piece of nonsense are worth following up. But put as bluntly as that it is out and out nonsense. There will always be those who have more experience than us, in whatever field. If you have, for example, never visited North Cornwall and want to make your way from the village near which I live to, say, St Minver, it would be worth listening to the experience of anyone who has done that journey before, whether or not you would otherwise take their advice on any other matter.
They might tell you, as a stranger, not to bother using any of the back lanes as you are most certainly bound to get yourself lost; that the route taking the main road is longer and that your journey will take you longer, but by doing so you will at least most certainly reach your destination.
So I would never counsel anyone to ignore all advice which come their way. But nor would I counsel anyone always to listen to advice. For one thing most of it is contradictory. Here's an example, building on the scenario outlined about of a young man, my son in the above daydream, taking his first tentative steps in getting to know the opposite sex. An old cynic, a bitter man, aged well beyond his years who, for reasons that are partly his fault, has had little luck with women and faces an austere old age in which the comforting company of a woman will be absent, might advise: never trust a woman, son, ever. Love 'em and leave 'em.
On the other hand let me introduce you to another man, a man who is something of a sentimentalist and one who has had the good fortune to find the true love of a good woman and who, largely because of a lack of imagination, has never been tempted to stray. Now well into is sixtieth decade and as blissfully happy with his wife as he was the moment she decided he was hers, he might well advise a young man such as my son: treat them with respect and courtesy. No doubt that is an admirable sentiment, but wholly unworldly and typical of a man who has intimately know very few women.
So as far as advice is concerned, my advice is this: listen to it, evaluate it, evaluate the chap who is giving you that advice, neither accept nor reject it out of hand, and, most importantly, take your time acting on it if you do decide to do so.
Britain is now into its second recession of the past 20 years. And an intricate part of the lead-up to both recessions was a house-price bubble. During the first, I had just arrived in London to try my hand at working casual shifts for the nationals and was in touch with a friend I had made while working for an evening paper in Cardiff, South Wales. The year was 1990 and house prices were into their second or third year of more or less trebling every few months or so. I owned a house in Birmingham on which I was still paying the mortgage and his advice was: sell, get as large a mortgage as you can and buy in London. You can't lose. Well, I ignored his advice because not many months later the house price bubble burst and a great many people who had done exactly as he had counselled me were left out of pocket and what the pundits call 'negative equity', which means their house has a market value lower, and ofen considerably lower, than the amount of money they borrowed in order to buy it.
This entry is now getting rather long, so my advice to myself here is to conclude this, the first part, and return to the thought in a day or two, by which time I shall have marshalled my thoughts, dredged my memory and come up with other examples of pieces of advice which were either totally useless or rather sage.

Depression — a short, layman's account

I've been rapped over the knuckles for neglecting this blog, so if I explain why that has happened, as a blog entry, I can kill two birds with one stone. The fact is that for the past few weeks, about four or five, I have been afflicted by something which has plagued me on and off throughout my life. It is called depression and is a rather widespread malaise, but curiously despite that, it is not very well understood.
Furthermore, there is still - still, despite any number of newspaper and magazine articles and media broadcasts about it - a certain stigma attached to depression, as though one is somehow less of a person for suffering from it.
An added irony is that we now understand far better what the affliction is and what causes it and that despite the label of 'mental illness', it is, in fact, a physical condition in which chemicals in the brain which work with neural receptors transmitting electrical impulses don't function as they ought to. I'm not too sure whether or not we know exactly why the chemicals stopped working as they are intended to, but it is that which is at the root of 'depression'.
Historically, we have associated 'feeling very low' and 'feeling unhappy' with the condition, but in fact those states are the result of depression rather than being depression itself. It is a debilitating condition and when sufferers are severely afflicted, it is very, very debilitating. The good news is that it is said to be self-limiting, although it has to be added that it doesn't 'self-limit' quite as speedily as sufferers would like.
I know that symptoms can vary, but in my case they include a constant, though not pronounced headache 24 hours a day - rather like the kind of thumping head you can get with a hangover, but not as bad, thought the persistence is irritating —, my neck area and the tops of my shoulders get stiff and they ache, I feel tired and sleepy, lack enthusiasm for doing anything, which can often become a marked reluctance to do anything at all and I just fanny about trying to kill time (which irritates the hell out of me), I find it very difficult to concentrate on anything, I want to be alone as much as possible and don't like being in company, I get impatient - and, as a rule, I am usually quite patient - my mind goes in circles thinking about the state I am in, and all day long I simply look forward to going to bed and to sleep again. And ironically, once I do get to sleep, I sleep like a log.
I should add that this particular bout is relatively mild, and I have had far nastier episodes. Unfortunately, each episode can go on for quite some time. On the positive side, I now recognise the symptoms and know what is going on, which, oddly, I find rather comforting.
Despite the progress made in understanding depression, there are still areas which we don't understand, for example how life stresses can apparently bring it on. In fact, I suspect they don't 'bring it on at all', that when we are healthy we find it far easier to deal with problems and difficulties than when we are not, and when we are depressed, even minor issues and problems can loom far larger than they warrant. Counter-intuitively, many mothers suffer from post-natal depression, often for quite some time, despite the convention that the birth of a child is something joyous and that they should be feeling happy. The theory is that their bodies find it very difficult adjusting to different homone levels when they first fall pregnant and re-adjusting later when those levels need no longer be sustained.
I now realise that in the past, I have, though no consciously masked the symptoms by drinking, so when I now feel the first squalls of an episode, one of the first things I do is to knock alcohol on the head. I have also in the past (this first happened about 15 years ago) taken to swallowing paracetamol and codeine headache tablets to get rid of the headache and neck tension, which, initially they did rather well. However, in the process I got myself addicted to codeine. And when I realised it last June (2008) - I was taking up to four doses a day, low by some standards, but not at all good for you - I stopped immediately and went cold turkey.
The period of withdrawal lasted for several months and I found that I was instead, as a substitute, I should think, craving more alcohol and, initially, also drinking more. In fact, about five weeks ago, when I decided I wanted to lose about one stone in weight (14lb in the imperial measure), the first thing I did was to drastically cut my consumption, and I suspect that it what triggered this latest bout.
So there you have it. It is generally thought that the vast majority of people will experience some kind of depressive illness at some point in their lives, and that a substantial majority does do intermittently throughout their lives. Homesickness in children is now thought to be a manifestation of depression, but conversely simply feeling low and fed up for a few days or a week or two is not the same as suffering depression. All to often such feelings, normal in themselves, are 'treated' with one of many kinds of anti-depressants, but that will have more to do with the pharmaceuatical industry being rather keen to turn a fast buck or ten than acceptable medical practice.

Naive until well into middle age, or how this idiot also fell for the myth

This might sound odd, but looking back I wish to God I had attended mixed sex schools all my life, because in one crucial way, life might have been a little easier, not to say more enjoyable. However, I didn't. My first school, which I attended from the age of four and three-quarters to nine, was the Sacred Heart School in Henley-on-Thames. Then I moved to Berlin and from August until the following Easter, I attended a German primary school, Steubenschule, in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After that is was all-boys schools all the way, first a Jesuit college in Berlin-Tiergarten for three years, then a Roman Catholic boarding school for five years.
All this meant that I didn't grow up with women in those crucial adolescent years. Why does that matter? Well, it matters because it wasn't until late in my life that I realised that girls and women are just the other gender, that if there is something special about them, it is the individual about whom there is something special, she as a person, not she because she is a woman.
Growing up, of course, women had what we guys wanted and at times we thought of nothing else, so it is no wonder that we guys, who for many, many years are, unfortunately, apt to think with our dicks, were so easily persuaded that women were, in some way, something special. And naturally it was something for which women were grateful and which they encouraged.
But those guys who attended mixed schools were a little more savvy to the ways of women than those poor idiots stuck in single-sex schools and often, like me, in boarding schools to boot. Oh, well, as the cliché goes, better late than never.